Entries from February 2015

February 26, 2015

For the past Century, Hollywood and African Americans have had a star-crossed relationship with the movie industry waging an image war against Blacks. Here's my Chicago Defender column on this sad situation.

Selma boycotted but Hollywood still got Glory

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

Hollywood’s snub of the very important Black film, Selma, about the extremely important march to demand voting rights for African Americans 50 years ago, was so absurd, so ironic, that it was joke worthy.

On cue, Host Neil Patrick Harris literally opened Sunday night’s 87th Academy Awards show with this pale one-liner: “The best and the whitest...sorry brightest.”

It was a feeble attempt to sugar coat the bitter truth. Although the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, is a Black woman, the actors nominated for best performances this year were all white.

The Blacks-are not-worthy judgement was determined by the Academy voters who are 94 percent white. Last month’s Golden Globe Awards paid a little homage at least. David Oyelowo’s brilliant performance as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ava DuVernay inspired direction at least garnered two nominations.

“Why are we still begging white people for approval?” asks Sergio Mims, who writes for a Black film website, Shadow and Act, and is a co-founder of Chicago’s Black Harvest Film Festival, before shrugging off the Oscars brush off as no big deal.

Mims might be right. There are the obvious bragging rights, but there is no guarantee that an Oscar will get an actor more work or a higher salary.

And long after all the sound and the fury over this year’s Oscars have come and gone, the real action will remain where it already is: at home on our big flat-screen TV sets.

Going out to see a movie, with servings of popcorn, soda and candy, can cost a family of four as much as $80 so we’re staying away in droves. According to a CBS News Poll, 84 percent of Americans see movies at home, four percent at the theater and 10 percent pretty much divided between home and the theaters.

Television is also giving the theatrical movies a run for the fame and fortune as far as actors and producers are concerned.

More than two and a half viewers watched Laurence Fishburne’s Hannibal every week as the veteran Black actor pulled down $175,000 per episode. Fishburne is also a co-star along with Anthony Anderson on the TV sitcom, Black-ish. He and Anderson are also producers..

Producer Lee Daniel’s new drama, Empire, starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, has been building its viewership from week to next. The Hip-Hop mogul show, which MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry summed up as a combination of Breaking Bad, Glee, House of Cards and The Real Housewives, is the new “it” show for Black viewers.

Since she created Grey’s Anatomy, Writer and Producer Shonda Rhimes has her own cottage industry on network TV with Private Practice and Scandal. She is also an executive producer on How to Get Away with Murder, the new TV drama that last month earned the show’s star, Viola Davis, a Screen Actors Guild Award.

More than nine and a half million viewers watch Kerry Washington’s Scandal religiously. She reportedly earns $150,000 per show which means no one’s going to be throwing a rent party for her anytime soon. But, this is where the money gets really funny. While the audience for ratings champion, The Big Bang theory, is twice that of Scandal, all three of the white stars, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki are paid $1 million each per episode.

That’s entertainment. Hollywood won’t be winning many awards for treating African Americans fairly over the past century. America’s movie industry has been waging an image war on Blacks since D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation first hit movie theaters 100 years ago. Griffith’s movie, originally named The Clansmen, espoused white supremacy while glorifying the KKK. One scene features white actors in blackface who are supposed to be newly elected Black legislators during Reconstruction, sitting around, barefoot, eating chicken, drinking whiskey and recklessly eyeballing white women.

Donald Bogle’s, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, pretty much sums up much of Hollywood’s presentation of Blacks well into the 1980s.

It’s that history and what took place on the Pettus Bridge that brought tears to some in the audience as they watched John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn-- aka John Legend and Common--perform, and later accept Oscar for Best Original song, Glory.

“We know that right now the struggle for freedom and justice is real. We live in the most incarcerated country in the world,” Legend said during their acceptance speech. “There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850. When people are marching with our song, we want to tell you that we are with you, we see you, we love you, and march on.”

Common and Legend are right on. The struggle continues. But every now and then, we do get to witness some glory.

February 18, 2015

Compared to other corruptionand lying offenses in the Land of Lincoln, the Jackie Robinson West team scandal seems downright bush league.

The Little League team was officially disqualified last week for falsifying residency documents. Their national championship was yanked because teammates didn’t live where they were supposed to live. Their transgression was that the South Siders were mostly South Suburbanites.

There was no argument that this Cinderfella team could slug some balls; they were better than the teams they beat. All 13 of these Black boys trained as hard as they played. They didn’t play dirty. They didn’t cheat. They proved to be good sports when they won and good sports in their eventual loss at the World championship to South Korea. They could have served as role models for those perennial losers, the Cubs, and those champion cheaters, the Patriots.

They were just in the wrong places at the wrong time.

In this world where you live matters. The 12-year-old Little Leaguers who played for JRW live in a nation where white conservatives claim concern about the number of Black fetuses aborted every year but could care less about the welfare of Black babies once they are born. The JRW players live in a state where four of its last seven governors and three of its U.S. Representatives have gone to prison for corruption. The JRW players live around a city where, since 1972, a third of the aldermen have been convicted of corruption. The adults did something wrong, but the boys were expected to learn a lesson about doing the right thing.

The main lesson they could learn from Map-gate is getting away with cheating is a coin toss and that there is enough blame to go around.

Blame could flow to Darold Butler, the JRW Little League manager, Bill Haley, the league president, Michael Kelly, the Illinois District 4 administrator and the parents of the players. The map be damned, JRW is Chicago’s go-to Black Little League team because it has longevity and the potential to win. As a parent, if you want your talented kid to play on a team where he may get noticed, one that will be here today and not gone tomorrow, it’s JRW.

It’s hard to imagine that any of the three men didn’t know they were circumventing the rules. DNAinfo.com reported that five of the JRW players facing questions about their residency were also on the 2014 Chicago White Sox ACE 12-year-old All-Star travel team. Only one of those ACE players had Chicago listed as his hometown on that roster.

Blame could go to Stephen Keener whose due diligence went undone. The Little League International president and CEO only got around to discovering, months after the South Side boys won the national championship, that the grown-ups running the program here may have tried to put the fix in by rigging the maps.

When confronted with no choice but action, Keener lawyered up and released this statement after stripping JRW of its title: “Little League International stands by the difficult decision that was announced on February 11. As Jackie Robinson West Little League has retained counsel, we will not be granting any additional media interviews or issuing additional public statements for the time being. Little League International will be working with its counsel to ensure Jackie Robinson West Little League officials and their attorney are fully educated regarding the factual basis of the decision.”

Blame could also go Chris Janes, vice president of the Evergreen Park Athletic Association, whose Little League team lost to JRW 43-2 in the second round. Depending on your perspective, Janes is either a sore loser who was hell-bent on snitching or a well-intentioned whistleblower who exposed the fact that Butler had constructed a super team by breaking the rules.

It’s understandable. Seeing the team that beat your team like it owned it at White House for a photo op with President Barack Obama, then going on an all expenses-paid trip to Disney World to hang out with Mickey and Minnie and then parading through Millennium Park with Mayor Rahm Emanuel in step is enough to make you see red.

There can be enough absolution to go around as well. If he’s the concerned citizen he says he is, Janes should vigorously push Little League International to examine the rosters of all the teams that played in the championship so that all can be assured that JRW’s misconduct was in a league of its own.

If he insists on maintaining the geographical restrictions CEO Keener should make it a requirement that every team publicize boundaries so that everyone knows who’s eligible to play where. If everyone was supposed to keep it a secret that some of the JRW players were ineligible, it was not very well guarded. Politicians and principals were all bragging in local and social media about JRW players being residents of their towns and students at their schools.

And the three men who got JRW into this mess ought to lobby to get the residency rules changed from a one-size-fits-all to one where you can recruit the best players without suffering the worst consequences.

February 11, 2015

If anything can that raise a Republican’s ire almost as much as a Black man in the White House, it’s labor unions.

So few should have been surprised when the new Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, came up with an ingenious initiative to further weaken the state’s labor unions.

During last week’s State of the State address, Rauner said he would like to see “empowerment zones” in counties across the state where voters would decide whether unions could exist and workers should be obligated to pay associated dues. Given the governor’s party affiliation and the fact that he’s a one percenter, it’s easy to guess who he is zeroing in on empowering and who he’s zoning out.

Making the standard-issue, corporation-coddling Republican argument that the smaller the union presence, the greater the number of jobs, on Monday, Rauner signed Executive Order 15-13, which denies labor the right to deduct dues from state employees who benefit from union activities but don’t want to pay to support them.

As our newly constituted Congress is reaffirming, Republicans may be lousy at governing but they are masters of code wording, dog whistling and name-calling.

When the GOP set out to do some serious union busting by stripping organized labor of its funding, power and influence, for example, the words destruction and dismemberment were spoken mainly in quiet rooms while those southern states and Midwestern ones where Republicans ruled went about their dirty deeds. Instead, Republicans insisted these would be “right-to-work” states.

Rauner is just the latest of Republican governors, who after immediately taking office, has made it his mission to kneecap the unions. Republican Gov. Rick Snyder was not halfway through his first term when he signed a bill making Michigan the 24th right to work state in the nation. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has forged his anti-union alchemy into gold by cutting the collective bargaining rights of most of his state’s public unions and transforming himself into one of the current shiny objects among the potential 2016 Republican presidential nominee contenders.

Like Rauner, both Walker and Snyder asserted that their union body slams would mean more jobs for their states. So far, the reasons for Michigan’s modest job increases are debatable and Wisconsin’s job growth has been so slow that Walker grasped at one of the right wing’s threadbare straws blaming it on Obamacare.

Union jobs have always been considered “good jobs.” They have also been good for America. Whether it’s the 40-week, paid vacation, pensions, health insurance or higher wages, over the decades labor unions are directly and indirectly responsible for raising the standard of living for millions but cutting into the precious bottom lines of corporations as people and the people who over-reward themselves for running them. Labor unions also fail to endear themselves with Republicans by being important campaign contributors for the Democrats.

Unfortunately, for Black Americans, we find ourselves between the labor unions and a Republican place.

One out of every five working Blacks are government employees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, When the Republican’s national obsession with austerity was running at fever pitch six years ago, governors across America reduced their state’s payroll through mass layoffs of state employees. African Americans, who are overwhelmingly Democrat, took a disproportionate hit, becoming the most fired and at risk of being the least rehired.

From the beginning of the Great Migration until now, it’s been a continuous struggle for African Americans in Chicago to get either contractors or the labor unions to cut them in on the action. When black skilled craftsmen, who had come from generations of bricklayers from the south, moved north, by edit, union bosses blocked them from working on the best jobs.

History has stubbornly repeated itself. Lilly-white trade unions have been as much a part of the wink and nod society as the boardrooms they take on. Both have been almost exclusively populated with white men. Both have been perfectly satisfied with that chummy arrangement for far too long.

Even now, too often when you see construction companies at work on big projects throughout Chicago, you don’t see a crew that looks like the residents of the city. Even with the implementation of set-aside programs, you don’t see big black construction firms getting their fair share of the jobs.

Of course all unions are not alike but the battle between the governor and the unions may not be an easy one for Blacks in Illinois to join. It may simply be a case of going with the devil we knew or the devil we’re getting to know.

February 04, 2015

So just when America’s richestof the rich was uncorking the champagne and gorging themselves on imported caviar, it looks like the Commander-in-Chief has declared that the Class War is on again.

The opening volley was fired 35 years ago with what George H.W. Bush accurately described as “voodoo economics.” Since then, this nation’s super wealthy have been getting super wealthier, much of the middle class has been getting poor and the poor have been getting super poor.

A study in October by economists, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, reported that the share of the total income earned by America’s top one percent at the end of 2012 was 22 percent. Back in the late ‘70s, before Reaganomics and it’s trickle down theory, the share of earnings by top one percent was less than 10 percent.

Sticking to his “a rising tide lifts all boats” manner of governing, there was little in President Barack Obama’s proposed annual budget that would pointedly give financially strapped Blacks much hope.

There was no direct budgetary lifeline to the 11.4 percent of African Americans nationwide who are still unemployed and nothing straight up for the 25 percent of Black Chicagoans who are also in that same boat, either.

And, once again, there is no targeted help from the man who assiduously stays in character as all the people’s president--so much so, that some might accuse the nation’s first Black head of household at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with periodically doing back flips to assure those Americans who suffer from negrophobia that he is not practicing negrophilia.

But while there was not enough in the president’s $4 trillion budget proposal to trigger right-winger’s whining about preferential treatment for Blacks and other “takers,” there was more than enough fair share tax proposals aimed at the “makers” for Republicans to pronounce it DOA.

Without openly saying that he really wants to spread the wealth, the president said, “I want to work with Congress to replace mindless austerity with smart investments that strengthen America.”

He also let Republicans know that he wanted to rebuild the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and that he did not want to spend more on financing the military-industrial complex unless conservatives were willing to spend more on domestic programs that repair rungs on the economic ladder and expand the safety networks for those who have fallen on hard times.

President Obama is shooting for a national debate on whether we should be growing our middle class or allowing our fat cats to get fatter.

Monday’s budget was aimed at kick-starting the debate. Items on President Obama’s wish list included calls for laying a tax on the banks too big to fail, raising of the capital gains tax, limiting of corporate tax deductions, imposing a new tax on inheritances and taxing of overseas profits held abroad.

Although it is ostensibly a budget for 2016, it is also a game plan for next year’s presidential and congressional elections, meant to serve as the playbook for a consistent message for all Democratic candidates. It’s a rerun of Bill Clinton’s successful message that “it’s the economy, stupid.”

As soon as the president released his blueprint, the conservative talking points flew into action fast and furious.

“We’re six years into the Obama economic policies, and he’s proposing more of the same, more tax increases that kill investment and jobs, and policies which are hardly aspirational,” said Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the GOP’s go-to guy on keeping it all for the Superrich. “I think the President is trying to do here is to, again, exploit envy economics. This top-down redistribution doesn’t work.”

“Like the president’s previous budgets, this plan never balances – ever,” said House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “It contains no solutions to address the drivers of our debt, and no plan to fix our entire tax code to help foster growth and create jobs.”

Echoed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “What we saw this morning was another top-down, backward-looking document that caters to powerful political bosses on the Left and never balances — ever.”

Never ever allowing an opportunity to blame it on Obama, Republicans didn’t miss a beat.

According to a Pew Research Center’s report released in 2012, the average Black household wealth fell by more than half, to $5,677, while white household wealth fell 16 percent to $113, 149 between 2005 and 2009. That was during the Bush years, right before the Obama administration.

But the actual beginning the decline in Black household wealth meant nothing to Republican Donald Trump, who has not yet concluded that Obama was not born in Kenya.

“People are having a much lower income right now than when he took office. I mean, that to me is a really terrible statistic and if you happen to be African-American, it’s a total disaster. So what has President Obama done for African-Americans?” asked Trump. “Nothing.”